This present embodiments relates to medical diagnostic ultrasound. In particular, quantification is provided for three- or four-dimensional ultrasound diagnostic imaging.
Color Doppler data representing the heart or other organ of interest may provide useful flow information. For example, valvular regurgitation is an important cause of morbidity and mortality. Doppler echocardiography is a non-invasive technique to evaluate the severity of regurgitation. Several indexes have been developed for two-dimensional echocardiography using Color Doppler, Pulsed wave (PW) and Continuous wave (CW) Doppler. Volume flow may be predicted from modeling of manually segmented color data from two-dimensional images. These two-dimensional methods suffer from limitations of measurements done in a plane, so rely on approximations.
To acquire volumetric flow information, data is acquired over multiple heart cycles and stitched together to form the desired field of view. Stitched acquisition may suffer from inaccuracies caused by beat-to-beat changes in the flow, especially in patients with cardiac arrhythmia. Even where the inaccuracies due to spatial or cyclical variation are minor, various sources of error may result in inaccurate quantification.